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PROJECT ARROW
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. . .Authoring/ Research/ Reporting/ and Other Work;
Using the Higher Levels of Reading, Math, Language Arts, Social Studies and Writing. |
RADIO
HISTORY AND BROADCASTING ACTIVITY
The newscast
is usually a five-minute period devoted to the latest headline
news. It consists of from seven to ten swift-moving bulletins of
front-page
caliber. Each item contains from fifty to seventy-five words—except the
featured story, which may be from one hundred and fifty to two hundred
words
long. The newscaster, in selecting items to read,
strives for variety. Local, international,
national, economic, social, and
religious
items are included, and a human-interest story usually closes the
period, leaving a laugh
behind.
The newscaster never gives his own personal views. He merely reports. The generally accepted form of the five-minute newscast is the result of a compromise agreed upon by the radio industry and the press a few years ago, when the press questioned radio's right to use its various news services. Now practically every radio station engages the services of the Associated Press, the United Press, the Transradio Press Service, or the International News Service. Large stations employ more than one service.
The news items pour in over the teletype constantly and the newscaster—or the news editor—must select the items he wishes to use, interlarding them with local items of interest. Each item should be "date-lined"* but current custom is making it the usual thing to introduce the source of the news in the first sentence rather than to call out the name of a city or country before each piece of news broadcast.
The newscast is in a class by itself. Because the listener feels he is having a paper read to him, it is not so necessary to use a chatty style, as it is the case of other broadcasts. The news is so engrossing it requires no bid for attention.
An interesting and valuable experience for a student is to cull from the front page of a newspaper material sufficient for a five-minute newscast, taking the involved sentences of summary leads and breaking them up into several shorter ones, better suited to speech, arranging the items with the most important one first (or possibly second), making selections that cover a variety of types of news, giving the date-line information incidentally in the opening sentence and ending with the human-interest story.
The
following is a portion of an edited
newscast
from WTOP. Date-line information as
originally released by the United
Press has
been absorbed
in the opening paragraph, and phonetic spelling of foreign names has
been employed
to make reading easy for the announcer.
Here are a few examples of the wire report of the Transradio Press Service. News stories, delivered daily, including Sunday, on a leased wire which operates from 5 a.m. to 1 a.m. E.W.T., at the rate of sixty words per minute, are made as short as possible to permit their ready use in newscasts, enabling stations in fifteen minutes to give a budget of all the major news throughout the world.
There are other special devices that Transradio has developed, such as occasional "thumbnail" word sketches of men or women who may, for the moment, be unusually prominent in the news; brief, unusual, dramatic news oddities, sometimes touched with humor and usually used as "end stories" in newscasts to give the program an effective final touch; thumbnail stories giving geographical, industrial, or economic pictures of certain cities, islands, or unusual world locations that come into the news, and so on.
But
the basic content of the wire report is
spot news. And the basic principle in the writing
is simplicity of construction, so
that the reader finds it easy to move smoothly through
his newscast. The spot
story organization is much like that of all news writing. The
more important
facts are placed toward the top to facilitate cutting in length, and factual information
is emphasized for
spot news programs, with color and dramatic phrasing
used only to vivify the facts and not as an end in itself.
The
distinction must be kept in mind
between spot news programs and supplemental news feature programs;
between
straight radio news broadcasting and commentator programs, which are
largely
editorial.
The “Roundup” lead is particularly suitable for shorter news broadcasts, such as those of five minutes. The stories mentioned in these roundups already have been covered in separate, individual stories. (Note: The news editor at a radio station can take this compactly written information and make it more conversational.)
* In radio, "date-line" refers to locale only, since the date is always current.